Tag Archives: Guantanamo Bay

Infiltration of the US military: Arrests of terrorist spies validate Center’s concerns

A Muslim US Army chaplain in an extremely sensitive post has been arrested as an alleged terrorist spy, and a senior Air Force enlisted man is being held on similar charges, with more arrests expected.

Capt. James “Yousef” Yee had been assigned to minister to captured al Qaeda terrorists under detention at the US Naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. According to the US Southern Command, Yee was also the “Muslim adviser to the commander of the joint task force at Guantanamo.”

Yee reportedly was caught with classified documents about the al Qaeda detainees and their American interrogators, including their identities. He also had sketches of the detention camp, raising fears he was helping plot the terrorists escape.

The officer, a former Lutheran who reportedly converted to Islam at about the time of the Persian Gulf War in 1991, was arrested September 10 for “sedition, espionage, aiding the enemy, spying and failing to obey a general order,” according to the Washington Times.

The Center for Security Policy has been warning for years that the Armed Forces’ program for Muslim chaplains, as structured under the Clinton administration, is a means for terrorists to infiltrate the US military. A senior White House political operative, working with the founder of a Wahhabi-funded pressure group, has been discouraging investigations into these and related matters.

News reports, some of which conflict in the early stages of the story, say that Yee had quit the US Army after his conversion to Islam, and spent four years in Syria to learn Arabic and undergo Islamic indoctrination. The US recognizes Syria, a totalitairan regime led by a Ba’ath party like that of Saddam Hussein formerly in neighboring Iraq, as a state sponsor of terrorism. After returning from Syria, Yee re-joined the US Army, which made him a chaplain.

Yee’s detention validates concerns about poor security procedures concerning ideologues who infiltrate the US military for treasonous purposes, and about how political correctness and pandering to certain favored ethnic and religious groups has damaged the war on terrorism. The Pentagon’s Inspector General reportedly is investigating the chaplain problem.

News of the Yee case follows arrests and guilty pleas by alleged terrorists who held or hold leadership positions in some of the largest “mainstream” Muslim pressure groups, like the American Muslim Council and the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Click here for details about recent Senate hearings concerning state-sponsored Islamist infiltration of the US and its institutions.

Fifth column II

Almost exactly six months ago, at the start of the liberation of Iraq, the Center for Security Policy warned that a “fragging” incident at the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom “could be the precursor for a far larger and more dangerous problem, both for the military and for American society more generally. Call it the Fifth Column syndrome.'”

This ominous forecast was prompted by a disturbing possibility: Sergeant Asan Akbar, the alleged perpetrator of a lethal grenade attack on his superiors who commanded the 101st Airborne on the eve of the unit’s “jump off” into Iraq, “could have gotten murderous ideas about America, its armed forces and the Muslim world from a chaplain in the U.S. military.”

Saudi Credentialing of Chaplains?

The Decision Brief went on to note that, “As of June 2002, nine of the armed forces’ fourteen Muslim chaplains received their religious training from [a] Saudi-supported entity, the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences (GSISS) in Leesburg, Virginia. In March of that year, the multi-agency Operation Greenquest raided the offices of GSISS, along with twenty-three other Muslim organizations. Agents also raided the homes of Dr. Iqbal Unus, the Dean of Students at GSISS, and Dr. Taha Al-Alwani, the school’s President. According to search warrants issued at the time, these groups were raided for “potential money laundering and tax evasion activities and their ties to terrorist groups such as…al Qaeda as well as individual terrorists…(including) Osama bin Laden.”

Enter Captain James Yee

These troubling facts have, regrettably, just been called to mind once again. This week, the Army arrested one of its Muslim chaplains, Captain James Yee, charging him with five offenses: sedition, aiding the enemy, spying, espionage and failure to obey a general order. According to the Washington Times, it “may also charge him later with the more serious charge of treason, which under the Uniform Code of Military Justice could be punished by a maximum sentence of life” in prison.

At this writing, it is not clear whether Captain Yee was one of those recruited, trained and certified by the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences. What is known about him, however, according to a profile that appeared in the New York Times shortly after the 9/11 attacks is that, at the time he was “The newest Muslim chaplain…, a Chinese-American and a West Point graduate who was born into a Lutheran family, took an interest in Islam in college and deepened his convictions while stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky, where he was studying vehicle maintenance during the month of Ramadan alongside four visiting Egyptian army officers. In a telephone interview, Chaplain Yee said he left the military to attend a traditional Islamic school in Damascus, Syria, where he spent four years studying Arabic and religion. He is serving with the 29th Signal Battalion at Fort Lewis, Washington.”

The article went on to quote Chaplain Yee as saying that, “Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, some of the 80 Muslims on his base have come to him with concerns about being deployed to fight Muslims overseas. He said he tells them, An act of terrorism, the taking of innocent civilian lives is prohibited by Islam, and whoever has done this needs to be brought to justice, whether he is Muslim or not.'” If true, this would be commendable and helpful to the war effort.

Unfortunately, subsequent to that interview, Capt. Yee was assigned to minister to Al Qaeda, Taliban and other enemy combatants incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. According to press accounts, he is suspected of performing while there a very different service for his co-religionists. When he was arrested, he was reportedly carrying classified documents, including diagrams of the facilities in which the prisoners are being held. He may also have been facilitating communications between the detainees and perhaps fellow terrorists still at large in ways that could undermine U.S. efforts to interrogate the former and counter the latter.

An Isolated Problem?

One can only hope that the surveillance that resulted in Yee’s arrest is part of a wider effort to ensure that chaplains ministering to Muslims in the U.S. military are promoting the sorts of moderate, pro-American views he purportedly held in 2001, rather than the sort of radical, intolerant and jihadist views of the so-called “Islamists.” Otherwise, the danger is very real that serving members of the armed forces could be subjected to ominous proselytizing intended to give rise to clandestine Fifth Column activities in this country and a whole new front in the War on Terror.

These sorts of concerns prompted two of the Nation’s legislators who are most knowledgeable about Islamist penetration and influence operations in the United States Senators Charles Schumer (Democrat of New York) and Jon Kyl (Republican of Arizona) to call in recent months for just such an assessment by the Pentagon. To date, their appeals for action by the Office of the Secretary of Defense appear to have gone unanswered. If that situation was undesirable before the arrest of Chaplain Yee, it is wholly unacceptable in its aftermath.

The Bottom Line

Muslims in uniform have a potentially important contribution to make to the national security, just as their civilian counterparts can contribute greatly to the commonweal. We cannot, however, allow Islamists among them to use our guarantees of religious freedom or, for that matter, other civil liberties to destroy the U.S. military and governmental institutions established over two centuries ago to promote and safeguard those liberties, and the millions of Americans of all faiths who hold them dear.

Evidence grows that ‘Laurent of Arabia’ has it right: Saudi Arabia is an unreliable ally at best, at worst a real foe

(Washington, D.C.): It is becoming harder and harder to be an apologist for Saudi Arabia. People — including many who should know better — are still trying, to be sure. But the evidence continues to accumulate that confirming the assessment a French RAND analyst by the name of Laurent Murawioc recently gave the Defense Policy Board to the effect that the Saudis are not “with us” in the war on terror.

In the following Wall Street Journal op.ed. article, Simon Henderson chronicled some of the most recent indicators of where Saudi Arabia comes down on the binary, friend-or-enemy choice President Bush on 20 September announced would have to be made by every nation. Surely, as Mr. Henderson notes, “There is perhaps no point in having more enemies than you already have.” Still we ignore the facts about who the enemies we have actually are at our peril.

One can for the moment reserve judgment about the need to exercise the relatively draconian steps Mr. Murawioc deems in order — including seizing the Saudi oil fields — and yet embrace the reality that Saudi Arabia cannot be allowed to continue promoting Wahhabist Islamism around the globe, not least in the United States itself, without incurring American retaliation in an appropriate form.

THE SAUDI WAY

by Simon Henderson

The Wall Street Journal, 12 August 2002

The recent statement by Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister that the U.S. will not be allowed to use Saudi soil to launch an attack on Iraq is further proof that the House of Saud is not our “ally” in the war on terror. Last month’s Defense Policy Board briefing (as reported in the Washington Post) made a good point when it described Saudi Arabia as “active at every level of the terror chain.” The Bush administration’s attempts to distance itself from such statements will prove increasingly difficult as the truth about the Saudi kingdom becomes better known.

Despite the handshakes and diplomatic niceties, it is clear that the “American way” is very different from the “Saudi way.” Under the House of Saud, the people of Saudi Arabia — including foreign workers and visitors — are subjected to juryless trials, lashings and public beheadings. These actions bear no resemblance to American concepts of “inalienable” and constitutional rights. Instead, they reflect what the House of Saud calls “Islamic values.”

A Bargain

Before Sept. 11, the U.S.-Saudi relationship hid behind a veil of obscurity with public attention focused on the simple trade-off of reliable supplies of reasonably priced oil in return for protection against external threats. Most people accepted this bargain.

Since Sept. 11, and the preponderance of Saudis among the hijackers and those detained at Guantanamo Bay, the U.S.-Saudi relationship has assumed a new, more sinister aspect. Even in the past, it was not a liaison that stood up well to public scrutiny. Now it certainly does not.

The Saudi way of public diplomacy is to deny everything; for months Interior Minister Prince Nayef simply said the Sept. 11 hijackers had stolen Saudi identities. For the less gullible, the Saudi style is to spin, and if that doesn’t work, spin some more. The Saudi line on why so many Saudis were involved in the attacks is that Osama bin Laden wanted to strain the U.S.-Saudi relationship. Nice spin. Anyone questioning Saudi involvement in Sept. 11 can be accused of doing bin Laden’s bidding.

But there is much more to the links between the hijackers and the House of Saud than many are willing to admit. A Jan. 9 story in U.S. News & World Report, entitled “Princely Payments,” provided a lead which few have followed up. Two unidentified Clinton administration officials told the magazine that two senior Saudi princes had been paying off Osama bin Laden since a 1995 bombing in Riyadh, which killed five American military advisers. A Saudi official was quoted as saying, “Where’s the evidence? Nobody offers proof. There’s no paper trail.”

I followed the lead and quickly found U.S. and British officials to tell me the names of the two senior princes. They were using Saudi official money — not their own — to pay off bin Laden to cause trouble elsewhere but not in the kingdom. That is “the Saudi way.” The amounts involved were “hundreds of millions of dollars,” and it continued after Sept. 11. I asked a British official recently whether the payments had stopped. He said he hoped they had, but was not sure.

There is a logic to this “Saudi way,” at least from a Saudi point of view. It will offer little comfort to those who lost loved ones on Sept. 11. Paying off bin Laden might be the simplest and least bloody way of dealing with the threat of Islamic extremism, at least in Saudi Arabia.

Does this make Saudi Arabia an enemy or an ally? Again, our logic says an enemy. But the fuss over Foreign Minister Prince Saud’s statement and the Defense Policy Board briefing actually works in the Saudis’ favor. By inching closer towards conservative Islam, the House of Saud hopes it will find support from the majority of the kingdom’s population, which, according to reports as recently as a few months ago, overwhelmingly supports bin Laden.

Why doesn’t the Bush administration admit the difficulties with the Saudis and complain about the complicity between senior princes and bin Laden? Diplomacy, like politics, is the art of the possible. There is perhaps no point in having more enemies than you already have. But the split is not something that can be hidden forever. A major problem is that Washington is no longer sure who within the House of Saud to deal with.

Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto ruler, who met President Bush in Crawford, Texas, in April, was not one of the princes who was paying off bin Laden. The ailing King Fahd is in Geneva, dying according to some, having last-gasp medical attention according to others. But while he is there, Abdullah lacks complete authority. Two weeks ago, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak went to visit Fahd in what was interpreted by some observers as a slight to Abdullah.

Rumors of schisms within the royal family abound. King Fahd, along with his fellow full brothers in the “Sudairi Seven,” including Defense Minister Prince Sultan and Interior Minister Prince Nayef, are now said to be more wary of the U.S. relationship than Abdullah is. Sultan is in line to be king after Abdullah; Nayef would follow afterwards. Often it seems that the Sudairis are keeping Fahd alive in order to deny the 79-year-old Abdullah the throne. The Saudi system is such that if Abdullah becomes feeble or ill, he will be passed over.

Some reports suggest that the royal family infighting has become vicious. A junior prince died in a car accident in the desert, another had a heart attack, a third lost a long struggle against drug and alcohol abuse. It is hard to tell whether this is just normal attrition among the cadre of 5,000-plus princes or something else.

Will “the Saudi way” cope with the strains in the U.S. relationship and the apparent gridlock in decision-making in the kingdom? We are in new territory. Already the kingdom has allowed itself to lose its position as principal supplier of imported oil to the U.S. (That position was lost in the last quarter of 2001, despite Saudi ambassador to the U.S. Prince Bandar spinning the line that the kingdom was sending extra oil as a gesture of support following Sept. 11.)

In the last two weeks, it has become apparent that talks on the opening of Saudi gas fields to energy majors like ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch/Shell and BP were deadlocked. The kingdom apparently did not want to give the impression that it needed foreigners to build the desalination plants and power generation units that the Saudi people so desperately need. Brownouts often occur in major cities and a stink of sewage pervades many residential areas of the capital.

While putting up barriers for U.S. action against Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Riyadh is taking a calculated risk that it no longer needs U.S. security guarantees. The other traditional part of the oil relationship has changed also. In the preliminary talks before the Crawford summit, the Saudis threatened to cut off oil exports for two months unless U.S. policy supporting Israel was changed. (This did not, of course, stop Saudi officials from claiming they would never use oil as a political weapon. More spin.)

Like Iran?

Saudi Arabia appears to be heading in the direction of fundamentalist Iran, deliberately distancing itself from foreigners and being a hindrance rather than a help to the U.S. The royal family no doubt hopes this will enable them to continue to rule — they have no interest in Arabia becoming a republic.

For Washington, the assumption must be that Saudi Arabia will continue to fund radical Islam. It is what the Saudis believe in, and what the royal family must allow or risk having its credentials to rule questioned. So money will continue to flow to Hamas and other groups across the Muslim world. The key test will be what is good for Saudi Arabia rather than what might upset the U.S. It is “the Saudi way.”

Mr. Henderson, an adjunct scholar of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, runs saudistrategies.com, a consulting firm.

Where’s O.S.I. When We Need It?

(Washington, D.C.): On the same day Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld felt obliged to shut down the Pentagon’s recently established Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), fresh evidence arrived of the urgent need for the sort of truth-telling that organization was established to perform.

According to the 27 February editions of USA Today, a new poll by the Gallup Organization has established that “most Muslims don’t believe Arabs carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and disapprove of the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan.” This poll, described as “the most comprehensive survey of Muslim countries taken since Sept. 11” is said to confirm “anecdotal evidence of a huge gulf between the West and Muslim nations that existed before the attacks and remains deep.”

According to Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport, “Respondents overwhelmingly describe the United States as “ruthless, aggressive, conceited, arrogant, easily provoked, biased. The people of Islamic countries have significant grievances with the West in general and with the United States in particular.”

The Center for Security Policy commends Secretary Rumsfeld for appreciating that the continuing requirement for counteracting such misperceptions — many of which have been fostered and aggravated by disinformation and propaganda disseminated by America’s “friends” in the Islamic world (notably, the government-controlled press of Egypt and Saudi Arabia and the Islamist-indoctrination centers known as madrassas) that have been sponsored by the Saudis all over the world. We deeply regret, however, that the tasks associated with this challenging mission will, as a result of an extraordinarily effective disinformation campaign waged against the Office of Strategic Influence (thoughtfully discussed in the lead editorial in Wednesday’s Washington Times), almost certainly be harder to perform.

Disorganized at Defense
The Washington Times, 27 February 2002

After being relentlessly pilloried over a Feb. 19 front-page story in the New York Times suggesting that the Defense Department has been putting together an international “disinformation” campaign to help the war on terror, the Pentagon announced yesterday that it would shut down the Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), the featured target of the story. While this public relations fiasco was taking place and the administration was being eaten alive by the mainstream media, the Pentagon’s assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, Tori Clarke, and her minions were uncharacteristically quiet, leaving OSI’s defenders to twist in the wind and wage a desperate almost invisible back-door campaign to defend their mission.

But an article by Rowan Scarborough, published in Monday’s editions of The Washington Times, suggested that OSI, which was set up by Douglas J. Feith, the highly respected U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, and Air Force Brig. Gen. Simon P. Worden, could have actually played a key role in aiding the war on terror by counteracting false, anti-American propaganda being spewed out from places like Baghdad, Tehran and Pyongyang. Administration officials contended that there were no plans to put out false stories, emphasizing that OSI’s draft charter made no mention of such a scheme. One source told The Washington Times that OSI was designed to “get the truth” to places like Iran and Iraq.

OSI, which was to work with the State Department, would have attempted to finance moderate clerics’ efforts to persuade students to avoid the “madrassas,” or religious schools. This was to include providing them with Internet access so that they would be exposed to more tolerant views. The office would have also provided Iraqi citizens with news reports and factual information about Saddam Hussein’s bloody regime in Iraq. Essentially all of this relevant material was omitted from the original story in the New York Times.

Why did the Pentagon do such a poor job of communicating this factual information to the public? Well, one Pentagon source told Slate magazine’s Scott Shuger that Mrs. Clarke “put the Times onto the story because she viewed the OSI as a threat to her operation.” Mrs. Clarke will surely deny that this is the case. But it is undeniably true that her shop did an awful job in telling the public the truth about OSI. And it is hardly the first time in recent weeks that the Pentagon public relations machine has provided a propaganda windfall for America’s enemies witness the mindless dissemination of photos of al Qaeda and Taliban operatives being escorted to the prison at Guantanamo Bay, sans explanation. That incident subjected the United States to mindless sanctimony and vitriol from Europe.

In short, this would appear to be the second recent page-one debacle visited on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld by his PR folks. It would appear to be time for some major changes in Mrs. Clarke’s shop.

Who’s Disinforming’ Who?

(Washington, D.C.): Last week, the New York Times did a front-page hit piece on the Pentagon’s recently established Office of Strategic Influence (OSI). It claimed — purportedly on the basis of on-the-record comments by the organization’s Assistant for Operations, Col. Thomas A. Timmes USA (Ret.) at a recent industry conference and explicitly on the basis of disgruntled, but unnamed, Pentagon sources — that the OSI was preparing to disseminate “disinformation” to foreign press and governments (including friendly ones) as part of the war on terrorism.

Predictably, the Times‘ report set off a firestorm of criticism in the media, including demands not only for a blanket Pentagon prohibition on the use of disinformation but for the complete disestablishment of the Office of Strategic Influence. Regrettably, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — who was obliged to spend much of last week disavowing any interest in, let alone authorization for, DoD disinformation campaigns — signaled yesterday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “the person who’s in charge is debating whether [the OSI] should even exist in its current form, given all the misinformation and adverse publicity that it’s received.”

This would, as the following column by the Center for Security Policy’s President, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. which appeared Friday in National Review Online makes clear, be a serious mistake. After all, the war on terrorism is going to require the United States to do the sorts of things the OSI was created to perform: Bringing not disinformation but the truth to bear on behalf of America’s strategic interests. These include, as the Washington Times reports this morning, counteracting Iranian disinformation now raining down on Afghanistan in the hopes of destabilizing the Karzai government and offering alternatives to the Islamist madrassas in Pakistan that serve as petri dishes for the next generation of terrorists.

If such an effort is not enabled by the resources of the Defense Department and coordinated by competent people in the Office of the Secretary of Defense like Brigadier General Simon “Pete” Worden, the OSI’s director, chances are that it will be done somewhere else in an inferior and far less synergistic fashion. It would be particularly ill-advised to fall prey to the temptation to conduct these sorts of operations as a “black program” entirely out of the public eye; such a step would simply invite intensified speculation that the Pentagon is, in fact, engaged in influence and information operations that involve disseminating lies.

Secretary Rumsfeld and the “person in charge” of the Office of Strategic Influence, Under Secretary Douglas Feith, should reaffirm their support for this initiative — not attempt to appease its critics by dismantling this needed organization. It would be particularly egregious for them to do the latter insofar as the charges that OSI would like to engage in disinformation are, themselves, untrue, as Mr. Rumsfeld himself observed yesterday on Meet the Press:

It’s not clear to me that what [Tim Russert read to him from the original New York Times article and a subsequent Times editorial about OSI and disinformation] is true. You read it as though it were fact. To my knowledge, no people are quoted by name as to whether or not those things are true. I don’t believe they’re true. I know that if they are true, they won’t happen, so — because I’m not going to allow it to happen.

On that basis, the Office of Strategic Influence can clearly render the valuable service it was meant to perform. It should be allowed to do so. At the same time, those who had hoped to keep OSI from doing so — by planting disinformation about its activities in the U.S. press — are the ones who should be put out of business. They certainly have, as a senior White House official put it in today’s Washington Post, done “a tremendous disservice to the President” by raising questions about the Administration’s credibility when he was overseas. That disservice would be greatly and unjustifiably compounded by inflicting real harm on the war on terrorism and the national security more generally if allowed to succeed in taking down the Office of Strategic Influence.

Defending Deception


By Frank J. Gaffney Jr.
National Review Online, 21 February 2002

The good news is that Leftists at home and abroad are no longer getting front-page attention for their preposterous claims that the Pentagon is badly treating terrorists by denying them prisoner-of-war status during their incarceration in Guantanamo Bay. The bad news is that the Bush administration’s critics over the war on terrorism have not given up, they have simply chosen a new stick with which to beat up the U.S. government.

The current campaign has been prompted by charges breathlessly publicized by the New York Times to the effect that the defense department is preparing to use disinformation against foreign governments and press. Suddenly pass are concerns about the “sensory deprived” Taliban and al Qaeda detainees captured on film being forced to kneel in their Cuban stockade. The cause de jour has become an insistence that the Pentagon tell nothing but the truth, the whole truth, all the time.

While the focus is different, the political subtext of the new campaign like the one that preceded it is the same: Knock down the public’s confidence in the administration when it comes to waging war on terrorism.

It is as extraordinary as it is regrettable that this second round of overheated rhetoric appears to have been precipitated by the same source as the first: The Pentagon’s own public-affairs shop. This organization recently, if belatedly, took collective responsibility for the decision to release the provocative photograph of the Guantanamo detainees. That self-inflicted wound was compounded by the failure simultaneously to explain that it chronicled not their day-to-day treatment, but a single moment in time: The exceedingly dangerous transition of hardened and ruthless terrorists from the plane that brought them to Cuba to their cells.

The defense department’s PA shop has yet to take credit for setting off this week’s cause celebre. Still, the front-page, above-the-fold article in the February 19 editions of the New York Times that precipitated the current firestorm of criticism was sourced by unnamed individuals transparently defending their bureaucratic “turf” against proposals that would cede to a newly created Office of Strategic Influence any authority to disseminate information to overseas audiences.

The tragedy is not only that the secretary of defense has been obliged by actions of his own subordinates once again to spend precious time, energy, and political capital defending his department against the Left’s rants. Rather it is that, in the process, he has been compelled sharply to circumscribe, and perhaps to disable, an effort whose importance he appreciates better than practically anyone: The ability of America’s unrivaled dominance in information technologies and techniques to contribute to winning the war on terrorism.

This is to take nothing away from Secretary Rumsfeld. To his credit, he has responded to the latest charges with characteristic forthrightness and courage, affirming the importance of public and press confidence in the defense department’s official declarations while underscoring the military’s need to use deception in appropriate circumstances to assure tactical and strategic success.

Unfortunately, in the process he felt compelled to rule out the use of “disinformation.” A press release issued by his office Wednesday declared flatly, “Under no circumstances will the office [of Strategic Influence] or its contractors knowingly or deliberately disseminate false information to the American or foreign media or publics.”

To be sure, this is and should be the general rule. Yet, producing misleading indications of our intentions and otherwise acting to deceive an enemy is not merely a time-tested and -honored practice in warfare. It is in some cases D-Day comes to mind essential to the success of military operations and, most especially, to keeping U.S. combat casualties to an absolute minimum.

This is, arguably, even more true today than ever before. As the American armed forces mount worldwide operations under the unblinking gaze of seemingly omnipresent, 24/7 media coverage, the need to induce the enemy to misapprehend our plans and intentions becomes all the more challenging, even as it becomes ever more important. Secretary Rumsfeld needs to have available to him creative ideas about how to accomplish that goal, and the latitude necessary to act on such ideas where saving the lives of our servicemen and women and/or our civilian populace may hang in the balance.

Winston Churchill once trenchantly observed, “In a time of war, the truth is so precious that it must be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” It would be regrettable, and potentially costly, if the Bush administration were to allow itself to be bludgeoned into foreclosing the deception option to protect truth and the lives of all those who treasure it.

Worried About Civilian Casualties in the War on Terror? Don’t Allow Terrorists to Masquerade as Non-Combattants

(Washington, D.C.): The Bush Administration has been roundly assailed at home and abroad over its decision to treat individuals captured in Afghanistan as unlawful combattants rather than prisoners of war (POW). While one would never know it listening to the complaints from allied government spokesmen and human rights activists, what is at issue is not the humane treatment of these detainees. They are all being treated well, considering they have to be confined — better than they were in Afghanistan, better than they would be in their own countries and certainly far better than they would have treated any bonafide American POW who fell into their hands.

What is, instead, at issue, are the implications of according such detainees the status of prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention. It is particularly important to understand these implications for the civilian populations at risk in the war on terrorism — especially at a time when media and policy elites are beginning to “hyperventilate” over reports of U.S. attacks in Afghanistan resulting in unintended and regrettable “collateral damage.”

Fortunately, in recent days, two published items have helpfully clarified the compelling reasons for the U.S. government to continue rejecting appeals to call the detainees POWs. The first is an excellent White Paper by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies co-authored by Andrew Apostolou, an historian at Oxford University, and Fredric Smoler, a professor of history at Sarah Lawrence College. The second appeared as an editorial in the Wall Street Journal on 11 February. Both should be required reading for everyone participating in the debate over those incarcerated at Gitmo.

Excerpts from
The Geneva Convention Is Not a Suicide Pact

by Andrew Apostolou and Fredric Smoler, Foundation for the Defense of Democracy

Maintaining a strict distinction between lawful combatants (conscripts, professionals, militiamen and resistance fighters) and unlawful combatants (such as bandits and terrorists) not only protects the dignity of real soldiers, it safeguards civilians. By defining who can be subject to violence and capture, the horror of war is, hopefully, focused away from civilians and limited to those willing put themselves in the line of fire, and seek no cover other than that acquired by military skill.

If we want soldiers to respect the lives of civilians and POWs, soldiers must be confident that civilians and prisoners will not attempt to kill them. Civilians who abuse their non-combatant status are a threat not only to soldiers who abide by the rules, they endanger innocents everywhere by drastically eroding the legal and customary restraints on killing civilians. Restricting the use of arms to lawful combatants has been a way of limiting war’s savagery since at least the Middle Ages.

In addition to the legal and military practicalities, there is an obvious moral danger in setting the precedent that captured terrorists are soldiers. Not only does that elevate Mohammad Atta from a calculating murderer into a combatant, it puts the IRA, ETA and the Red Brigades on a par with the Marine Corps and the French Resistance.

The U.S. is trying hard to find the most humane way to wage, and win, this war. There is no precedent for this challenge and no perfect legal model that can be taken off the shelf. Yet it is precisely because the U.S. takes the Geneva Convention seriously, with both its protections for combatants and the line it draws between combatants and civilians, that the U.S. is being so careful in the use of the POW label. Some of the detainees may yet be termed POWs, but restricting the Geneva Convention’s protections to those who obey its rules is the only mechanism that can make the Geneva Convention enforceable.

Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson once said that the U.S. Constitution is not a suicide pact. Neither is the Geneva Convention. If well-meaning but misguided human rights activists turn the Geneva Convention into a terrorist’s charter and a civilian’s death warrant, the result will be that it will be universally ignored, with all that implies for the future of the international rule of law.

Geneva Conviction
Review & Outlook
The Wall Street Journal, 11 February 2002

If international human rights groups had the courage of their convictions, they’d applaud President Bush’s decision last week that the Geneva Convention applies to Taliban, but not al Qaeda, fighters captured by the U.S. In doing so, he is showing more respect for the Convention than his critics.

The core purpose of the Geneva Convention is to encourage the conduct of war in a way that minimizes violence to civilians. Another aim is to encourage respect for basic human dignities — toward civilians, combatants and captives. Yet another goal is to encourage warring powers to set up chains of command to ensure that combatants are held responsible for their actions.

One of the most important ways the Convention accomplishes these goals is to require that warring parties make a distinction between combatants and
civilians. Soldiers are supposed to be subject to a chain of command, wear insignia and carry their arms openly; they are required to abide by the laws of war, which forbid attacks on civilians. If they don’t, then they’re not soldiers; they are illegal combatants, not entitled to the protections of the Convention. Breaking down this distinction — as the human rights groups wish to do — would have the effect of legitimatizing terrorists and giving them more incentives to hide among civilians and go after civilian targets.

It doesn’t take a degree in international law to figure out that men who fly civilian airplanes into office towers aren’t legal combatants. Article 4 of the Geneva Convention specifies the conditions under which combatants who aren’t members of the armed forces may be deemed POWs. (See nearby box.) Those clamoring for a tribunal to decide the status of the al Qaeda detainees ought also to read Article 5, which says a tribunal is necessary only “should any doubt arise.” Where’s the doubt here?

Mr. Bush’s decision on the Taliban detainees was more difficult, and advisers made good cases both ways. In the end, he did what Presidents are supposed to do: decide. He ruled that Taliban detainees, as the fighting force of Afghanistan, are covered by the Convention but that they had forfeited the right to POW status since they had broken the laws of war as outlined under the Convention’s own provisions.

Mr. Bush’s decision may well save American lives. Most crucial, it allows the U.S. to interrogate the detainees, who may have information about other attacks. POWs are required to give only their name, rank and serial number and must be repatriated after hostilities end. It would be an act of national suicide to put these men back in circulation when their declared objective is to kill more Americans.

Ultimately, the U.S. will have to decide what to do with the detainees. That might mean trying them by military commission or in civilian court. The detainees come from 28 countries, and another option is to send some home for trial. Afghanistan said over the weekend that it plans to put the Taliban foreign minister on trial.

In the meantime, the international human rights groups continue their assault on America. Having damaged their credibility by raising false alarms about detainees in Guantanamo, they are now descending on Afghanistan, in search of evidence against the U.S. there. Human Rights Watch says it’s sending in a team to evaluate the extent of civilian casualties from the American bombing. It doesn’t seem to matter that never before in history has a warring power tried so hard to avoid killing civilians.

The 1950 Geneva Convention never envisioned the kind of war we’re now in. Yet by both its conduct of the war and its treatment of the Taliban and al Qaeda detainees, the U.S. has shown its respect for the Convention and the principles for which it stands.

WILL CLINTON’S CUBA INITIATIVE AMOUNT TO ONE STEP BACK, TWO FORWARD FOR CASTRO?

(Washington, D.C.): One must say this
for Bill Clinton: It takes someone with a
truly unique view of reality to announce
“The Cuban Government will not
succeed in any attempt to dictate
American immigration policy” — at
the very moment that he was changing
a twenty-eight-year-old policy in direct
response to pressure from Cuban dictator
Fidel Castro.

This example of the sort of Orwellian
double-speak that Mr. Clinton and his
Administration have elevated to an
art-form is so transparent that even the
unschooled can penetrate it. Less clear,
however, is its ultimate purpose.

Life Support for Fidel

The key element of the Clinton Cuban
initiative — the open-ended detention of
those refugees who manage to get to the
United States and removal to Guantanamo
or as-yet-unidentified “safe
havens” in third countries for those
intercepted at sea — represents what the
French call a coup de main. By
this, swift, unexpected and decisive
action, the Administration has taken a
giant step toward one of its most
cherished, if most closely held,
objectives: the normalization of
relations with Fidel Castro’s Havana.

This has been the unmistakable agenda
of those like Morton Halperin, the failed
candidate for a senior Defense Department
position whose consolation prize was a
senior position on the Clinton National
Security Council staff. In the immediate
run-up to President Clinton’s
announcement last February ending the
trade embargo against another
unreconstructed communist totalitarian
state, Vietnam, CNN broadcasted a report
revealing that unnamed NSC officials
wanted next to lift the embargo on Fidel
Castro’s Cuba.(1)

On April 6, 1994, Dr. Halperin and an
NSC colleague, Richard Feinberg, met with
representatives of “Pastors for
Peace” and “Freedom to
Travel,” organizations that have
blatantly engaged in activity prohibited
under the terms of the U.S. trade embargo
against Cuba.(2)
By so doing, the NSC officials conferred
a degree of legitimacy on those
determined to aid one of the planet’s
last, repressive communist regimes. At
the very least, Dr. Halperin reinforced
their expectation that the Clinton
Administration is prepared to adopt a
more conciliatory policy toward Fidel
Castro’s Cuba. In fact, according to a
report published two days later by the Miami
Herald, the “leaders of
the two organizations…emerged from
talks with White House officials brimming
with confidence that their acts of civil
disobedience are easing U.S. restrictions
toward Cuba.”

Castro’s Out of Time

For those sympathetic to Castro, both
inside and outside of the U.S.
government, however, there is no longer
time for such a gradual improvement in
bilateral relations. The rapid
deterioration in the Cuban economy — the
result of stultifying socialist
mismanagement and a disastrous harvest as
much as American sanctions — has made
Castro’s situation desperate in recent
months. Popular anger against his
government has begun to manifest itself
in large public demonstrations and even
riots.

Dramatic steps had to be taken to save
Fidel. But, doing so would require ending
the Castro regime’s unique status as a communist
adversary and the ideological
justification for resisting Castro,
something most Americans believe —
despite the passing of the Cold War —
continues to warrant U.S. political
opposition and economic sanctions. This
then appears to have been the real, if
unstated, object of last Friday’s
decision. In the wake of the presidential
directive, those fleeing Cuba have been
transformed from political refugees into
illegal immigrants. Castro’s repression
has been at least implicitly endorsed as
a means of preventing a fresh tide of
asylum-seekers from reaching
international waters and American shores.

To be sure, the Clinton move to end
the nearly thirty-year compact with those
in Cuba willing to risk everything for
freedom appealed to other constituencies.
The Congressional Black Caucus has with
increasing shrillness of late vented its
frustration over a failed Haiti policy by
contrasting the favored treatment
received by Cuban emigres with the
incarceration and deportations
experienced by would-be Haitian
immigrants. Many in Florida and elsewhere
in the United States, alarmed at the
fiscal and political implications of
large numbers of immigrants, are
receptive to any effort seen as stemming
the human tide.

Sops for America’s
Anti-Castroites?

It is also true that President Clinton
has announced several steps meant to
signal his unhappiness about Castro’s
adamant opposition to democracy. Cutting
off hard currency flows from
Cuban-Americans to those still on the
island, restrictions on charter flights,
increased radio propaganda, etc. are all
welcome — as far as they go. The
trouble is that they do not go very far.
They certainly do not begin to
offset the implications of the
immigration initiative for the legitimacy
of Fidel’s regime.

They are, rather, afterthoughts to the
main policy move, adopted under intense
pressure from the firmly anti-Castro
Cuban American National Foundation after
the Administration unveiled its dramatic
shift on the refugee issue. This is one
politically powerful constituency that
neither Mr. Clinton nor Democratic
Florida Governor Lawton Chiles wants to
alienate in the midst of the latter’s
hotly contested reelection bid.

What’s The Real
Game?

Importantly, these measures have been
couched in terms of seeking to add
pressure on Castro to open up his society
to more democratic principles and
practices — not to removing Fidel from
power. If, despite such steps and
repeated Administration professions of
support for the Cuban Democracy Act (the
tough legislation on the books aimed at
ending Castro’s rule), the real Clinton
agenda is to move toward normalized
relations even if Castro remains in
power, the latest sanctions may
prove to be little more than
window-dressing.

Specifically, there could be a
move — after the 1994 election and
before the presidential race in 1996 —
to cut a deal with Castro: His
anti-democratic restraint on emigration
will be rewarded with liberalized travel,
translating into increased tourism
(already Cuba’s main source of hard
currency revenue) and perhaps new
opportunities for U.S. business
investment. In promoting the
latter, the same argument should be
expected that proved so effective in the
debates about China’s MFN status and
ending the embargo against Vietnam —
namely, that American companies must not
be put at a disadvantage against their
international competitors simply because
of strategic concerns or principle. The
domestic political calculation may be
that cutting off new infusions of
anti-Castro immigrants may make such a
deal less of a liability for 1996 by
playing to anti-immigrant sentiments and
by strengthening the hand of some in the
younger generation of Cuban-Americans who
do not share their parents’ rabid
opposition to the Cuban tyrant.

The Bottom Line

Consequently, now is the time to
establish where Mr. Clinton really stands
on the central question: Will he take all
available steps to liberate Cuba from
Fidel Castro? Or will he settle — as he
has done with China, Vietnam and North
Korea — for more false promises of good
behavior from unreconstructed communist
despots? The test will be whether
he swiftly adopts policies, including a
naval blockade, aimed at capitalizing on
Castro’s present parlous state and
bringing democracy to the island in the
only way it can be accomplished: by
ridding Cuba of Castro and his dwindling
cadre of loyalists.

It is to be expected that criticism
will soon be heard for any such course of
action from the West Europeans, Canada,
Japan and most especially Castro’s once
and future patrons in Russia. In fact, if
past practice is any guide, those within
the U.S. government who advocate
normalized relations with communist Cuba
are likely to encourage diplomatic and
economic pressure from abroad calculated
to undermine even the Administration’s
relatively modest
“pro-democracy” measures.

Should Mr. Clinton acquiesce to this
pressure (willingly or reluctantly),
whatever faint hope exists that his
package of initiatives will produce the
liberation of Cuba will be vaporized. The
net result will instead be to fatally
erode the time-honored and still
appropriate basis for American opposition
to Castro’s rule — anti-communism —
while clearing the way to put his regime
on economic life-support by undoing the
embargo used to effect that opposition.

– 30 –

1. See in this
connection the Center’s Decision
Brief entitled Welcome
to the N.S.C., Dr. Halperin: Will You
Give Democracy the Shaft Elsewhere — As
Has Been Done in Vietnam? ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=94-D_16″>No. 94-D 16, 4
February 1994).

2. For more
information on the Halperin agenda for
normalizing relations with Cuba, see the
Center’s Decision Brief entitled
First Hanoi, Now Havana?
Spare Us Morton Halperin’s Prescriptions
for Potemkin Democracy in Cuba,
(No 94-D 33, 8
April 1994).

Coalition for Security, Liberty and the Law







    The FBI could get a wiretap to investigate the mafia, but they could not get one to investigate terrorists. To put it bluntly, that was crazy!    



-Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE) 


The government’s prevention of any further attacks on the American homeland since September 11, 2001 has largely been the result of a number of policies and programs implemented since that fateful day.


In October 2001, Congress enacted the Patriot Act by overwhelming, bipartisan margins, arming law enforcement with new tools to detect and prevent terrorism: The USA Patriot Act was passed nearly unanimously by the Senate 98-1, and 357-66 in the House, with the support of members across the entire political spectrum.


When it became time to renew the Patriot Act, the Center for Security Policy played an integral part in helping the administration and responsible lawmakers overcome obstructionist efforts from a variety of sources.  Through a television ad campaign and an influetial letter to Congress, the Center’s efforts helped ensure that the intelligence and law enforcement communities would have the tools they need to keep America protected from future terrorist attacks. 









President Bush signs the Military Commissions Act to try suspected terrorists. (White House photo)

The Coalition for Security, Liberty and the Law is committed to ideas such as the belief that Islamofacists should not be rewarded with a “Terrorist Bill of Rights” and that Guantanamo Bay is an appropriate location to detain al Qaeda’s most dangerous operatives. 


The Coalition also remains vigilant of efforts that seek to undermine the United States through what we call “Lawfare” –  a strategy of the weak employed to debilitate and defeat the United States through the minipulation of international and domestic legal fora, opinion and processes.  Calls for the United States to provide terrorists with Geneva Convention protections and to end its Terrorist Surveillance Program are just a few of the more recent examples.  As further challanges to the United States emerge, the Center will continue to be the leading advocate for the promotion of liberty through sound laws that protect, not endanger, American security.